Long Repressed in Syria, an Internal Opposition Takes Shape

Six weeks after antigovernment protests began, a group of opposition figures in Syria announced what they called a united front and asked for support from the army.

KATHERINE ZOEPF

Syria’s nascent opposition movement, organized by an amorphous group of young activists operating mainly online, now faces its biggest test: whether it can sustain protests in the face of a brutal government crackdown.

A movement that until recently was diffuse and poorly organized, driven underground and into exile by decades of violent repression, is evolving into one led by activists in Syria. They are trying to seize on the fury surrounding the arrest of teenagers in the southern town of Dara’a last month to create their own Arab Spring.

On Wednesday, six weeks after the antigovernment protests began, a group of opposition figures announced what they called a united front, calling on the Syrian Army to side with the protesters and protect them from the feared state security apparatus.

Underscoring the challenges facing it in a police state, the group insisted on keeping the names of its members in Syria anonymous to protect them — all but two in Dara’a, who were assumed to be already exposed. It did provide the names of about a dozen activists in Syria to The New York Times.

The group, called the National Initiative for Change, said that its 150 members in Syria represented a broad spectrum of groups opposing the leadership of Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad, as well as most of Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities. Since journalists have been denied visas to Syria, it is impossible to independently verify the breadth of the coalition’s popular support.

Syria’s opposition had essentially been stymied since the army crushed a 1982 uprising in the central city of Hama, killing 10,000 people in an episode that haunts Syrians to this day. Some expatriate groups were formed, but were little known inside Syria. The Arab uprisings gave new life to the movement.

“Once it happened in Tunisia, people started talking about Syria,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Maryland-based opposition activist who left Syria in 2005 after receiving death threats from a member of Mr. Assad’s government.

In the movement’s infancy, expatriate Syrians who operated Web sites, smuggled in donated satellite phones and computers, and provided leadership on how democracy evolves helped to create crucial momentum. But their role is fading as Syria’s internal opposition movement struggles toward political maturity and its leadership begins to coalesce, some of these overseas activists say.

After Tunisia’s uprising, which led to its president’s ouster in January, activists inside and outside Syria began debating the best time to begin their own protest movement, via Facebook and Skype. “I wanted it to be in the summer because I felt that we weren’t quite ready,” Mr. Abdulhamid said. “I knew that so many regions of the country didn’t have people to monitor events because the media was completely unfree. I also knew that the opposition in Syria couldn’t play a role like they did in Egypt. I knew that everything had to be underground.”

But activists in Syria decided that mid-March was the best time to begin protests, he said, in part because they worried that news of growing chaos in Libya might have a dampening effect on the democratic ambitions of their fellow Syrians.

“If things in Libya went bad, then people in Syria might get too frightened to protest,” Mr. Abdulhamid said.

According to Radwan Ziadeh, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who signed on to the National Initiative for Change, March 15 was set as the date for the beginning of Syria’s protest movement, but the demonstrations that were held that day were a disappointment.

“They were very small, in the Hamidiya market in Damascus,” Mr. Ziadeh said. Coincidentally, a group of young boys from Dara’a had been arrested for writing antigovernment graffiti on a wall and on March 18, their parents and other relatives marched to the political security building in Dara’a to protest their children’s treatment. The activists suddenly realized that they had been given their Rosa Parks moment, the grievance that they could build a campaign around.

“We’d been trying to ignite protests before, but now we had our spark,” Mr. Ziadeh said.

Ausama Monajed, a London-based spokesman for the new coalition, said that the opposition needed a serious ally like the army on its side if it was to develop into a credible alternative to the Assad government. He said that its members had seen evidence that large segments of Syria’s army today were sympathetic to the demands of the protesters.

“There are credible reports that there has been fighting between divisions that are loyal to President Assad and those that are with the protests,” he said in a phone interview. “We are asking the army to take the side of the revolution, and to protect civilians from the mass killing of these security forces that are completely loyal to Bashar al-Assad.”

His assertions could not be independently confirmed. Even if large numbers of soldiers do defect, the elite units — far better armed and better trained than the rest of the army — are believed to have deep loyalties to Mr. Assad’s government.

The coalition is focusing on the Syrian defense minister, Gen. Ali Habib. Mr. Ziadeh said General Habib was a respected career military man with no known connections to Syria’s security forces and was believed to have an internationalist outlook. In 1991, General Habib led the Syrian troops who were sent to Kuwait to assist the United States in pushing out the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, and he is thought to have good relationships with American and Arab leaders.

But most important, Mr. Ziadeh said, members of the National Initiative for Change have had secret discussions with members of General Habib’s family, and they have been told that General Habib is sympathetic to the protesters’ demands.

“We’re calling on Ali Habib to play a central and vital role in the transition of the country alongside members of the political opposition and the revolutionary movement,” Mr. Monajed said. “We are in discussions to name a proper shadow government and at the right time we will name this shadow government. In the meantime, we are calling for an interim government and a new election law.”

Syrian media is strictly controlled, and in recent months the Syrian government has at times shut down cellphone networks and access to certain Internet sites, so the leaders of any new opposition party face a complicated and uncertain journey in their efforts to make themselves known to average Syrians.

Mr. Assad’s government has continued to insist that the weeks of unrest in Syria are the work of fundamentalist terrorist groups. On Tuesday, Syria’s state-run news agency, SANA, quoted a military source as saying that the army was in the restive town of Dara’a because it was “hunting the terrorist groups which had targeted some of the military sites and security personnel.”

Opposition leaders acknowledge that there are some Salafists, members of a fundamentalist school of Islam, among the protesters, though they say their numbers are small. Mr. Monajed said that a few members of the National Coalition for Change are Muslim Brotherhood members, although he insists that the coalition has no formal relationship with the group.

“The Salafist groups are there. They’re a fact of life,” Mr. Abdulhamid said. “The reality is, we do have extremists, but we are in control of the situation.”